Long live Titillium

The Titillium font (the name pays homage to composer Arvo Pärt and his tintinnabuli technique) was created in 2008 as an educational project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino as part of the Type Design course for the Master's Degree in Visual Design.

Typography and teaching

The educational project is the result of Marcello Signorile and Luciano Perondi's desire to introduce students to the practice of design and allow them to experiment with it: the design of Titillium, with its stringent requirements, becomes a powerful teaching tool that introduces and trains students to work within well-defined rules.

Open Font Licence 

Another successful initiative was to make Titillium available under a Creative Commons licence and then an Open Font Licence to facilitate its dissemination and stimulate its development in a co-design context. For several years, students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino have been taking care of the font. In addition to the students, the type designer community is invited to cooperate and/or develop their own variants of the font according to the terms of the licence. Here you can read about the origins of Titillium

Chialab and Titillium

We immediately embraced the idea of “taking care” and the open logic. Titillium has become part of the large family of open source practices, products and services (see Chialab.io) that we develop in order to improve them, adapt them to different contexts, make them grow and, if our customers allow us to, share them openly.

We test and use Titillium in various environments, especially in print and digital publishing. With the publisher Zanichelli, we carry out the most rigorous tests in the fields of education and scientific dissemination. We record any strengths and weaknesses in our wish list and always make repairs in accordance with the original design.

This gives us:

1. a valuable report consisting of use cases, design inconsistencies, technical issues, corrupted glyphs in the interpolation process, and additions to the glyphs list;
2. a font that continues to be appreciated and used: Titillium is currently present on more than 620,000 websites: United States 204,492,073, Turkey 45,543,237, Slovakia 3,557,867, Sweden 117,212, Poland 22,104,386 (source: Google Fonts). In Italy, thanks to the intuition of Gianni Sinni and his working group, it has become the reference font for the Italian Public Administration;
3. the desire and drive to invest in a relaunch of Titillium in a Pro version that does not lose sight of its open source origins and original design. 

Titillium Pro

In April 2023, we informed the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino of our desire to take care of Titillium by producing a new version of the font that would not overwrite the previous one but would complement it under the name Titillium Pro. We received a positive response shortly afterwards and began work on the following:

1. Design of glyphs to increase coverage of European and non-European languages.
2. Design of glyphs dedicated to the expansion of mathematical writing.
3. Design of the Black Italic weight.
4. Design of numbered and alphabetical “bulleted list” glyphs inserted into squares and circles (stylistic sets).
5. Optimisation of spacing, kerning and vertical metrics.
6. Fixing of corrupt and non-functioning glyphs.
   
   

Backward compatibility of Titillium Pro

All changes were made as faithfully as possible to the original Titillium design, while revising and ‘improving’ the design, consistency of shapes, spacing and kerning. In light of these changes, we recommend careful consideration of replacing Titillium with the new Titillium Pro version.

It doesn't end here

While working on Titillium Pro, a course of study and research on the serif version of Titillium was launched as part of the “Type Design” course at ISIA in Faenza. Developed by student Lorenzo Volpe and supervised by Antonio D'Elisiis, the Titillium project thus returns to “school”, just as it began. This research will be welcomed and developed at Chialab in the coming months, alongside the new sans version, making it an increasingly developed and high-performance family. The Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, in line with its initial intentions of cooperation and sharing, continues to support the modifications to Titillium and subsequent releases, promoting virtuous practices of collaborative design. 

Where to download Titillium Pro Sans

Chialab will take care of the new version, released under the same “Open Font Licence (OFL)”, which will be available on GitHub in a dedicated public repository, open to external contributions and maintained by us. Download Titillium Pro from GitHub

Titillium Pro
Project curated by Chialab based on Titillium by the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino.
Redesign from Titillium to Titillium Pro Sans: Antonio D'Elisiis.
Engineering & Mastering: Antonio D'Elisiis.
Kerning: Igino Marini, iKern.
Thanks to Prof. Marcello Signorile, Luciano Perondi, Zanichelli publisher.